mount authority of the parent state existed over them, yet a
large field of legislation had always been open to our Colonial
assemblies. They were accustomed to representative bodies and the forms
of free government; they understood the doctrine of the division of
power among different branches, and the necessity of checks on each. The
character of our countrymen, moreover, was sober, moral, and religious;
and there was little in the change to shock their feelings of justice
and humanity, or even to disturb an honest prejudice. We had no domestic
throne to overturn, no privileged orders to cast down, no violent
changes of property to encounter. In the American Revolution, no man
sought or wished for more than to defend and enjoy his own. None hoped
for plunder or for spoil. Rapacity was unknown to it; the axe was not
among the instruments of its accomplishment; and we all know that it
could not have lived a single day under any well-founded imputation of
possessing a tendency adverse to the Christian religion.

It need not surprise us, that, under circumstances less auspicious,
political revolutions elsewhere, even when well intended, have
terminated differently. It is, indeed, a great achievement, it is the
master-work of the world, to establish governments entirely popular on
lasting foundations; nor is it easy, indeed, to introduce the popular
principle at all into governments to which it has been altogether a
stranger. It cannot be doubted, however, that Europe has come out of the
contest, in which she has been so long engaged, with greatly superior
knowledge, and, in many respects, in a highly improved condition.
Whatever benefit has been acquired is likely to be retained, for it
consists mainly in the acquisition of more enlightened ideas. And
although kingdoms and provinces may be wrested from the hands that hold
them, in the same manner they were obtained; although ordinary and
vulgar power may, in human affairs, be lost as it has been won; yet it
is the glorious prerogative of the empire of knowledge, that what it
gains it never loses. On the contrary, it increases by the multiple of
its own power; all its ends become means; all its attainments, helps to
new conquests. Its whole abundant harvest is but so much seed wheat, and
nothing has limited, and nothing can limit, the amount of ultimate
product.

Under the influence of this rapidly increasing knowledge, the people
have begun, in all forms of government, t